Cindy Veach, Featured in the New Ocean State Review

All Over Again

I remember and tell it
               to the downed leaves rattling

across the patio, scraping
               together in the trees

then look away
               toward the pond—its calm denial—

its promise of bass,
               a small boat, oars.

These days I measure time
               by what is gone—

a year ago this, a year ago that.
               It’s the brittle season.

Each gust wills more leaves down,
               shivers the pond’s surface—

underneath painted turtles, bullfrogs, mayflies
               dig themselves into the muck.

It’s warm. It’s cold,
               I find the one beam

of sunlight,
               shadows across the page.

Out of nowhere
               a burying beetle

lands on its back, buzzes—
               I’ve lost my one father—

how dare you carry on
               as if nothing has happened.

“All Over Again” was written about three months after my father passed. I was visiting a friend in Mississippi on a property that contained an idyllic pond. I wrote the first draft as I was sitting on the porch looking at the pond. It was a beautiful October day—the sun was shining, the pond was still, there were birds at the water’s edge—but all this beauty seemed to exaggerate my loss by denying it. Of course, I wished I could deny it too. I wanted to look the other way and cling to the day’s calmness, the promises the pond offered. But I couldn’t hold that state of mind for any length of time before the realization of my father’s death would hit me all over again. I was angry at nature, at the beauty before me, at that beetle. I might have appeared calm on the surface but underneath I was deep in the muck of my grief. I settled on the poem’s form early in the process of revision. It was important to me that the format engage with space and sparseness. The staggered every other line indentations were chosen to help capture how the undeniable fact of my father’s death would ever so briefly retreat and then return.

Cindy Veach is the author of Her Kind (CavanKerry Press) a finalist for the 2022 Eric Hoffer Montaigne Medal, Gloved Against Blood (CavanKerry Press), a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize and Massachusetts Center for the Book ‘ Must Read,’ and the chapbook, Innocents (Nixes Mate). Her poems have appeared in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, AGNI, Michigan Quarterly Review, Poet Lore and Salamander among others. She is the recipient of the Philip Booth Poetry Prize and the Samuel Allen Washington Prize. Cindy is co-poetry editor of MER. www.cindyveach.com

photo by January Gill O’Neil